“Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book”

-Stéphane Mallarmé

“The Book, Spiritual Instrument”

Digital publishing is taking over traditional publishing. Digital publishing offers a lot of advantages. It allows publishers to reach readers all over the globe. Digital publishing leads to greater opportunities for them. It is safe to say that digital publishing is the present and the future of publishing.

But the idea of holding an actual book and reading it and processing it vs reading it on a screen just has a different effect. My whole life I have never been much into books, but when I do find one I like a hard physical copy has always been my way to go. I didn’t realize until recently that it makes things easier to have it on my phone, tablet, or laptop to just glance and read whenever I choose.

“The book will not become obsolete with new reading platforms, but rather, will change and develop new incarnations and relationships; it will continue to serve certain kinds of literacy needs and literacy desires – specifically, those related to its book-bound physically and potentiality”

– Jessica Pressman

“The Aesthetic Of Bookisgness In Twenty-First Century Literature”

A book will always be a book, but they way it is taken in wether digitally or physically will create a different effect to the reader/viewer.

My favorite book may be an oddity to some, but as someone who enjoys cooking and is also inquisitive, this book by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt fulfills both of those requirements. Kenji has made a career by teaching cooking science. This cookbook might just have more food experiments than actual recipes. The point of this book is not to just list out recipes, but to inform you as to why you do the things you do when cooking. That’s what intrigues me the most with this book. I love knowing how and why things work. He answers questions such as: Why does a potato take longer to bake than to boil? Why is pasta cooked in a large volume of water? These questions are the ones that I love learning the answers to.

As good as the design of this book is, the content is what hooked me in. Kenji blends recipes, personal stories, and food experiments extremely well in this book. It makes the book easy to read and keeps you guessing as to what’s around the corner. I should also mention that I discovered Kenji on YouTube where he does POV videos of recipes where he goes in depth and shows you every part of making the recipe. My favorite part about his book and YouTube channel is how he never cuts out his failures. 

“A book is not a case of words, nor a bag of words, nor a bearer of words.” – Ulises Carrion (1941-1989)

When we think of The Book’s future, as society and technology progress, our codex has evolved with us as an important tool. More than a tool. At this point, we can look at The Book as every form of media that conveys all forms of information. It is entertainment, it is expressive, it is instructional, and it is the present, the past, and the future. We’ve already reached mostly all physical senses in terms of recreating The Book. With cinema, VR, AR, Audio and e-books, art books, and anti-books you’d think we’ve hit a threshold. So what of Digital Publishing? Most recently we’ve come up with NFTs and NFTs are being produced in volumes and contain data, however, NFTs are a new format of publication that has only come about recently. The more methods of data storage we develop the more innovative we become and what we can build upon. Let’s take AR technology into account, supposedly we are able to drift away from VR technology, META has already introduced the school of thought to bring a virtual environment in place of the classroom. Why not flip the script? The codex is a tactile experience that allows us to interact with it and reference our lives. In an AR environment, we replace all whiteboards, all projectors, all screens, and text with interactive holograms so that we can explore data in a three-dimensional space. If we can recreate history such as Michael Jackson and Tupac through holographic concerts. We can certainly explore this technology for use at the consumer level that allows everyday people to maintain and create their own records of The Book,

A favorite book of mine that I’ve kept for a while is Percy Jackson the Lightning Thief. The cover shows Percy looking on to the city skyline from the ocean, sword in hand, and lightning striking down. The bright yellow font for the title contrasts the grayish blue of the cover. The book has a hardcover and a thick layer of pages that seemed like a daunting task for middle school me to overcome. I never spent much time reading books outside of required ones for school growing up, but the Percy Jackson series was the exception. The mysterious aura from its covers and use of Greek mythology drew me in and I felt I could easily get lost in the world. This nostalgia holds true today and I feel Percy Jackson set the bar for me on how to enjoy books. Regardless of if it’s fantasy, history, or any other genre, if I feel like I can be walking in the world being told, I can easily enjoy the story.

This notion of going to another world, and occasionally catching yourself caught up in the illusion is what makes books special. Compared to reading on other mediums, holding a book allows me to adjust my positioning, lay on bed, and physically control the pages and feel like I’m part of the story’s pacing.

“Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book.”

—Stéphane Mallarmé, “The Book, Spiritual Instrument”

When media opened, it shaped our experiences of both time and space. It has coordinated through media from painting to writing to film within our daily life. Digital technological innovations and changes have created favorable circumstances for digital publishing improvement, such as the possibility of diversifying content streams and revenue sources. 

For example, podcasts. Podcast took the world of the news by storm. More than half (51 percent) of the U.S. population has already listened to a podcast and this tendency will continue to grow. Podcasts has provided a unique vessel for news coverage. It can take the form of an ensemble-led talk show, a story, a magazine, or simply a conversation between two people. As more people and events happen in this world, stories are being told on a variety of platforms.

“Much as we love books, archiving them in libraries for future generations and exhibiting them behind glass as art objects, they are a vulnerable medium” (Borsuk 179).

“While we might assume that digital books will have a longer shelf life than print, the proliferation of reading devices coupled with the pace of technological development virtually ensures the obsolescence of e-books to particular software or hardware” (Borsuk 182).

Borsuk discusses some interesting ideas about books and their lifespan, tackling both print and digital. Though they both have their place and uses, I’ve always considered digital books to be the superior version between the two. As long as they have a place on the internet or in a computer, digital books should last far longer than print. However, Borsuk challenges this by discussing how, at least in their current form, they too will fade like physical books will. It made me reconsider digital books as a whole, and subsequently, how they’re created.

Digital publishing, as I know it, is the creation and sharing of some form of content, such as books and videos. I believe digital books encompass a large variety of instances. Typical e-books count, as they’re usually the digitized version of a physical book, but also books published on websites count. They may not have the standard layout of a book, but they give information like any book can.

It’s difficult to predict how advanced technology will be in the future. Will computers no longer exist as stationary or portable devices and instead become holograms incorporated into our daily life? I couldn’t say, however as Borsuk mentions, it does make sense that what we use to publish digital content will change over time. Maybe in a distant future, books will transcend their current form. Maybe digital publishing will become forum-like where anybody can publish without the need of money or a company’s support. Perhaps technology will standardize at some point so that data isn’t lost to centuries of inventions. Either way, I think digital publishing and digital books will adapt to whatever changes happen. People will always want to read something, even if the medium or platform changes. Books won’t totally disappear, and neither will publishing.

Works Cited

Borsuk, Amaranth. The Book. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2018.

“To change the physical form of the artifact is not merely to change the act of reading… but to profoundly transform the metaphoric relation of word to world.” (Borsuk)

Digital publishing describes the transformation of book content to bytes of data. From that physical space of page turning or opening a portal, to a virtual space meant to draw connections between readers and authors. Audiences are tuning into the screen capabilities of books as a different kind of art form. This digital means of publishing could then invite the reader to use other forms of media or virtual reality to convey a message.  

An example of an immersive digital experience could be that of choosing various options in a reader space that change how the narrative winds through different scenes. These options then feel more like a video game that captures audiences who find reading monotonous or boring, to enjoying the content being shared. This is sort of how artificial intelligence would “write” a book. This immersive experience is more a book of chance or a game of “would you rather?”  This idea comes from the argument that there exists an “erosion of deep literacy.” (Garfinkle and Thomas) Digital space presents its own challenges of literacy absorption. I highly recommend “The Erosion of Deep Literacy” as a resource to help guide digital publishing in todays wave of constant distraction. 

Another quote that had me pondering the books’ existence in digital form is from page 134. Stéphane Mallarmé states, “Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book.” YES, and therefore every book exists in the world to drive the digital media that comes from the society in which we live. The lives that inspire the content and motivate the author to share with digital world. That is how the inspiration of film or digital media comes to life. Digital publishing then draws connections from content received from print to content transformed into art that is perceived by the audience.  

Works Cited

Blog Post #2

“…the page is not a vessel, but an ocean; and the text, tossed on its waves, is a shipwreck in language that draws the reader’s eye across its shimmering surface.”

-Stephane Mallarme, A Throw of
the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance

This quote caught my attention as it relates to the future of books because I’ve always likened the internet to a digital ocean. In this example I would almost argue the opposite for the future of the book with individual words being the water, flowing to fill new forms. There are an ever expanding range of forms to fill, with new kinds of affordances built into them.

Our ability to freely design and display text, images, and videos leads to new layers of complexity that might appear in books of the future. One thing I could see happening would be the integration of flexible digital screens into books like those might appear at the Codex book convention.

Multimedia has become de riguer in terms of both format and content across several mediums. For example new articles, recipes, and blogs are all genes within the new electronic medium that have become multimedia artifacts incorporating text, images, and videos all into one. This blog post is doing that now!

I think that the future of a book might begin to incorporate the affordances of the format in which it is viewed. For example if viewed in a format that supports video like a tablet or computer there could be exclusive parts of the book that only work or appear in that format. This gets more into marketing and business model admittedly but I think that there is immense artistic and commercial potential in multimedia books.

Stories that have become movies or television shows like the Harry Potter or Game of Thrones franchise have already begun to incorporate images from the shows to the printed works. I think it is a reasonable extension that if the electronically published versions of the works become popular enough they might begin to incorporate multimedia as a standard part of the work.

Underpinning all of this are words that make these formats usable. Technology affords new levels of engagement with text and images that can be included in ways that were never possible before.

Hello! I’m Ana. I’m 19 years old, and this is my second year at WSU-V. I am majoring in Humanities with a primary concentration in DTC and a secondary concentration in Fine Arts. I am also minoring in Creative Writing. I am a huge fan of Asian cuisine and animals! I currently have two cats, an elderly dog, and a bearded dragon. I look forward to learning and working collaboratively with all of you this semester!

I am interested in the areas regarding designing and organizing the elements of a publication. Working with structure and typography is something that I love to do! I took the DTC 201 class last semester (Multimedia Design, something like that) in which we were tasked to create different media objects, and a big part of that that I took pride in and was thoroughly entertained doing was making it look nice! I like to think I have an eye for detail. Another class that I was in was 355 last semester, also with Will. Learning how to manually (which sometimes ended up being meticulous) place objects and elements within a page was a challenging but rewarding task for me. I feel like these two classes will help me, at least building up to the projects we have in store for this course. 

With all of that out of the way, I want to mention that I am also looking forward to exploring other areas of publishing more, and just learn about the industry in general. It’s an element of creation and content that I have been aware of but never really understood the inner workings of all that well. I have a lot of respect for the industry! If I am still invested in what I take away from this class I might even consider partaking in a career within it, who knows. 🙂

Folklore: the traditional beliefs, customs, and stories of a community, passed through the generations by word of mouth.

Published in 2001, Neil Gaiman authored American Gods. A personal adventure from an outsider coming to America. No pun intended. He traveled the states and wrote about his adventure in the eyes of the protagonist, Shadow. Although not my favorite era or genre, this book is my absolute number one. It checks all the boxes. Adventure, romance, mystery, drama, science fiction, horror, and even comedy. All parts American folklore flow into the paper between the sleeves. The design of this edition opens with a letter from the author describing the publishing of this text written 10 years later. The cover sleeve being illustrated before the story gave the author inspiration for the book. 

“What I say is, a town isn’t a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it’s got a bookstore, it knows it’s not foolin’ a soul.”

 

-American Gods

As a silent narrative, American Gods can pull a reader into the story as if you are living the characters life. Shadow is your typical American guy in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people. The quality of this narrative is different in such a way that he captures memories through places and songs that instantly put you there. Urban legends surface reminding you of past stories your family would tell you around the campfire. These fictional scenes are historically accurate in the way Gaiman describes the introduction of diversity or the haphazard of meeting strangers on a plane.  

Now turned into a series, I was able to read the book before watching it. In my opinion, the series captures the author’s goals and follows closely the timeline of events. For my personal journey with the book, I also built a playlist on Spotify that helped with mood setting. This book gave me respect for other cultures not known to myself both part fiction and part history believably true.  

“Text’s digital life untethers it from specific material support, making it accessible through a variety of interfaces (including the computer, cell phone, tablet, and dedicated e-reader), each of which influences our reading” (Borsuk, 124).

As publishing and books progressed to being more digitalized, the experience of reading these writings has also changed. I think this is a big reason for many writers choosing to publish their work digitally. Publishing digitally allows for more multimedia elements and room to experiment. There is a combination of sound, text, and pictures all in one. This form of publishing takes books to another level, further expanding their format and allowing a more diverse audience.

Thinking of the documentary we watched in class, the artists and writers featured showed their work at a convention. This helped them network and expand on their work. Of course, experiencing their books in the physical way they produced them is a specific experience, but I couldn’t help to wonder how the experience would change if it were to be published online. As the quote from the reading suggests, depending on the interface and how we are reading, our experience will vary. With the introduction of sound in online literature, either reading the words to you or sound effects that add on to the text, another sense of being triggered. This can change the course of how we interpret the words we are reading.

In the future, I don’t think that people will fully switch to digitally publishing. Digital publishing can be seen more as a tool to enhance the audience’s experience and allows for more accessibility to a broader range of readers.

I don’t personally own many books, so choosing a favorite out of the ones that are in my possession was a bit difficult. A book that has been on my mind since I got it is Voices from the Plain of Jars, edited by Fred Branfman. This book is a collection of essays and drawings from Laotian villagers who survived bombings during the Vietnam War. I got this book at a workshop held by Legacies of War, IRCO (Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization), and APANO (Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon) about unexploded bombs left in Laos and other Southeast Asian countries. These bombs are called cluster bombs and continue to injure adults and children in these countries. The bombs look similar to balls, so children who do not know the danger try to pick them up resulting in them being killed or seriously injured. The purpose of this workshop and Legacies of War as an organization is to raise awareness about these bombs from people and gain support so these bombs can be removed from the land.

I like this book because it mostly includes drawings and personal essays from survivors to tell the story. The drawings, although not very detailed, show tragedy and pain. The essays talk about sadness and fear. Instead of having a narrator explaining everything that happened, you can read the point of view of the people who survived and witnessed the crimes that happened. All of the survivors featured in this book tell a similar story with their drawings and writing without knowing each other, which shows the impact of the war. The drawings allow visuals so you can see what the survivors witnessed. There is a small foreword that explains the backstory of the war and what happened, along with an epilogue to explain how the bombings and war are still impacting the people who live on this scarred land. There is also an appendix with documents with documentation about the air war that comes from the US side, which also puts these bombings in a different perspective.

This book is a short read, but it is packed with information. It’s a simple design, so the content is what is most exciting and has made the biggest impact on me. The text is not dense and too packed with information that I feel overwhelmed.

“It can be one of those things, but only if those choices are interrogated and integrated into the way the work makes meaning” (Borsuk, 122).

I see a fairly bright future for digital books and publishing. Rather than see it as a competition to physical books, I see it as a great opportunity to explore elements that can further enhance a book’s meaning and be that expansion for creators who want more.

Digital publishing, while losing some interactions on your sense of touch, can enhance your other senses. 

One large example I like to bring up when talking about digital books are webtoons. Webtoons are digital comics. Webtoons have become popular within pop culture and I can see why.

Some artists take advantage of using digital publishing by creating elements to go hand in hand with their works to give a more immersive experience for readers and make their world come to life. For example, some webtoons play music in the background as you scroll through the pages. Other webtoons use animations to animate certain scenes.

One webtoon I like to share is a horror webtoon called “Shriek” by various artists. Each story is a different horror story but what’s most interesting is the use of technology they use. It has scary music and sound effects playing at certain times, your phone vibrates to scare you, there are animations on certain scenes, and some webtoons have a fake pop up text notification from the ghost. It makes the story immersive and popular amongst readers.

I guess overall my thoughts on digital books and publishing is fairly bright, especially if digital books like the one I mentioned is just the beginning. I can see that technology can enhance a reader’s experience and really help them dive deeper into the author’s world.

I actually decided to share two of my favorite books as I’m not sure if my first one would count.

The first book I have chosen to be my favorite is actually my log book. This book is simply a sketchbook I bought and transformed to be a book full of memories and adventures I have been on. From concerts, to picnics, movies, and more, each page is custom and never the same. It’s full of drawings, writings, stickers, photos, receipts, tickets, and so much more.

This book is special to me because it contains my personal memories and thoughts that I wish to cherish. It’s unique because it’s created specifically for me and so it is one of a kind. Since I put so much time into each page and overall thoughts, I will say it’s the contents, design, and personal narrative that means so much to me. It’s very much alive in my imagination even though it’s a non-living thing because it contains my memories and proof that I am a living being experiencing feelings and memories.

The second book I wanted to add is a photography book, the one I am sharing is called Korea: A Sensory Journey with photographs by Marc Verin and text by David A. Mason and Ji Eun Park.

This book explores South Korea through mainly photographs with poetry and short text as support.

I chose this book because photography is one of my passions and I aspire to create my own photography/art book to release and share with others. This photography book is actually one of the first ones I bought and I have so many more from Hawaii, to Canada, and even the PNW. 

This book is special to me especially through its design. It really opened my eyes to a passion (photography) I didn’t realize I had and I didn’t know there were photography books that also carried literary art.

This book (mostly photography books in general) is alive in my imagination even though it’s a non-living thing because I realize that these photographs and poetry captions were created by a specific person through their specific lens. I’m able to see how they view the world through visual arts as well as see the world in a different lens.